CTO - Fintech Venture

We are seeking a visionary and experienced technology leader to join a fast-growing executive team and drive the technological future of a dynamic global payments platform. This is a unique opportunity to lead and scale a well-established engineering organization and world-class product architecture.

Key Responsibilities:

• Strategic Leadership:

  Define and execute the company's overall technology vision, strategy, and roadmap, aligning it with business objectives and the unique demands of the payments industry. Serve as a trusted partner to the CEO, CPO, CRO, and other leaders, contributing actively to strategic decision-making, fundraising, and investor communications.

• Technology & Product Development:

  Oversee all engineering functions, from infrastructure to frontend. Lead the evolution of a cloud-native platform with an emphasis on security, scalability, and reliability. Collaborate with product and design teams to deliver features that enable new payment experiences and international expansion. Identify and assess emerging technologies, trends, and competitive threats within fintech and payments to maintain a strategic advantage.

• Team Building & Talent Development:

  Lead a high-performing, globally distributed team of 70+ engineers and technical leaders. Attract, mentor, and retain top-tier technical talent. Establish clear career paths and empower leaders to grow. Foster a culture of ownership, collaboration, continuous learning, and high performance. Drive technology innovation across the organization.

• Scale & Operational Excellence:

  Drive engineering operational excellence by implementing best practices for software development, testing, deployment, and incident management. Improve time-to-market and engineering velocity while maintaining high product quality and compliance. Manage the company's technology infrastructure (cloud-based), ensuring high availability (near 100% uptime), performance, disaster recovery, and business continuity for critical payment processing functions. Ensure the platform is highly scalable, resilient, performant, and maintainable to handle increasing transaction volumes and complexity. Optimize infrastructure costs and performance.

• Security & Compliance:

  Own the technical aspects of regulatory compliance across jurisdictions. Ensure adherence to best-in-class security practices, especially as the company expands into new geographies and sectors. Establish and enforce rigorous security policies, procedures, and controls across all technology assets and processes. Ensure strict compliance with relevant industry standards (e.g., PCI DSS) and regulatory requirements (e.g., GDPR, PSD2, local financial regulations). Oversee security audits, vulnerability management, incident response, and risk mitigation strategies specific to financial data and transactions.

• Budget & Vendor Management:

  Develop and manage the annual technology budget, ensuring efficient allocation of resources. Oversee relationships with key technology vendors, partners, and service providers.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience).
• 15+ years of experience in technology roles, with at least 5+ years in a senior leadership position (e.g., VP Engineering, Director of Technology, CTO).
• Successfully scaled engineering organizations from startup to growth stage (Series A–C or beyond), ideally with global teams.
• Deep hands-on experience in cloud-native architecture, microservices, modern DevOps, and scalable backend systems.
• Experience working with regulators, acquiring licenses, and designing systems to be compliant across jurisdictions.
• In-depth knowledge of cybersecurity principles, threat modeling, secure coding practices, and security frameworks relevant to financial services (especially PCI DSS).
• Strong leadership skills with experience building, managing, and motivating high-performing, distributed technical teams.
• Excellent strategic thinking, problem-solving, decision-making, and analytical skills.
• Exceptional communication, interpersonal, and presentation skills.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Background in building secure, compliant financial or payments infrastructure is highly desirable.
• Experience with specific payment technologies (e.g., card network integrations, ACH processing, real-time payment systems, tokenization, fraud detection systems).
• Knowledge of data engineering, analytics, and machine learning applications in payments (e.g., fraud prevention, risk scoring).
• Experience managing technology in a multi-region or global context.
• Advanced degree (MBA or technical Master's/PhD).